The SAVE America Act will soon have its moment on the Senate floor. When it does, will the GOP allow something like the filibuster to hold up progress? Republicans have been reluctant to change the decades-old Senate rule. But even staunch filibuster defender John Cornyn of Texas is now saying to nuke it. Is his change of heart just a fluke or a sign of things to come?
Cornyn Crosses Over
“If a man takes a swing at you and barely misses, that doesn’t make him a pacifist – it just means he has bad aim,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday, March 11. “Standing still and giving him a second free swing wouldn’t be wise or honorable; it would be foolish.”
It’s hard to argue with the senator’s point – whether regarding a fist fight or the filibuster. In 2022, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who was Senate majority leader at the time, led an attempt to end the filibuster. It only failed because moderate Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona stood firm against the move.
But Manchin and Sinema aren’t in Congress anymore.
Sen. Cornyn, and others who believe as he now does, make what is almost certainly an accurate prediction: Once the Democrats hold a trifecta of power – both chambers of Congress and the White House – they’ll take the nuclear option and remove the filibuster. Their logic, then, makes sense: Why give the Democrats a couple more years of being able to logjam the legislature when there’s no indication they would do the same in return? Or, to quote Sen. Cornyn’s own words from the op-ed again: “A rule is only a rule if both sides follow it,” and “the Senate rules will change eventually, whether Republicans like it or not.”
The Fate of the Filibuster
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) plans to bring the SAVE America Act to a vote sometime next week, but warns that they “don’t have the votes to either proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one even if we got one.” So, for now, he isn’t looking to push either a talking filibuster or the nuclear option.
But Thune may soon find himself in the minority. On Thursday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said he wants a vote on killing the legislative filibuster. “If we do go to a cloture vote [on the election bill], immediately after that we ought to vote on ending the filibuster,” the senator told reporters. Even if it failed to pass, it would still “get people on the record,” according to Johnson.
Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts has been pushing the so-called talking filibuster, in which the minority must hold the floor through continuous dialogue in order to stall a vote. While he still doesn’t support nuking the filibuster entirely, he did suddenly and drastically change his stance. It “preserves and protects the minority,” he recently argued of the procedure. “[W]hile Republicans are in the majority right now … we have been in the past the minority party and will be again in the future at some point. [The filibuster] has been an institutional part of who the Senate is.”
President Donald Trump, for his part, has been laying on the pressure from the White House. “He’s got to be a leader,” Trump said Wednesday in response to Thune’s refusal to invoke the talking filibuster or the nuclear option. “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT is by far the most popular Bill of its kind ever put before Congress!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. He told Republicans at the annual policy retreat that the act would “guarantee the midterms.” He added: “If you don’t get it, big trouble.”
As long as Sen. Thune remains unwilling to call a vote to end the filibuster, the SAVE America Act – or the DHS funding bill or any other piece of legislation, for that matter – doesn’t stand a chance. Democrats simply won’t let them pass through the Senate. Even Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the lone Democrat who these days seems likely to side with Republicans on much of anything, said he can’t support SAVE in its current form. And President Trump says he won’t sign any legislation until the SAVE America Act hits his desk.
But after increasing pressure on the GOP, the realization that Democrats will nuke it when they can anyway, and the radical shift in attitude of a few Republican senators, the days of the filibuster may be numbered.
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